Amin Maalouf - Samarkand

‘Suddenly an usher came to inform us that the ministers plenipotentiary of Russia and England were in the building and that they had an urgent note to convey to us. The session was suspended and the president of the Majlis and the Prime Minister went out; when they returned they looked like death. The diplomats had come to warn them that if the Shah were deposed, the two Powers would consider themselves regrettably obliged to intervene militarily. Not only were they getting ready to strangle us, but we were being forbidden to defend ourselves!’

‘Why such resolve?’ Baskerville asked, appalled.

‘The Tsar does not want a democracy within his borders. The very word parliament makes him tremble with rage.’

‘But even so, that is not the case with Britain!’

‘No. Except that if the Persians managed to govern themselves in an adult manner, that could give ideas to the Indians! And England would then just have to pack its bags. Then there is oil. In 1901 a British subject, Mr Knox d’Arcy obtained for the sum of twenty thousand pounds sterling the right to exploit oil reserves throughout the Persian empire. So far production has been insignificant, but a few months ago immense reserves were found in the Bakhtiari tribal areas, doubtless you have heard talk of this already. These reserves could represent an important source of revenue for the country. I therefore asked parliament to revise the agreement with London so that we might obtain more equitable conditions. Most of the deputies agreed with me. Since then the English minister has no longer invited me to the legation.’

‘But it is in the legation’s gardens that the bast is taking place,’ I said pensively.

‘The English consider that Russian influence is currently too great, and that Russia is only leaving them the congruent portion of the Persian cake, so they encouraged us to protest and opened their gardens to us. It is even said that they were the ones who printed the photograph which compromised Monsieur Naus. When our movement triumphed, London managed to obtain an agreement from the Tsar to share the country. The north of Persia would be the Russian zone of influence and the south would be the private property of England. Once the British got what they wanted, our democracy suddenly ceased to interest them. Like the Tsar they can only see it as an inconvenience and would prefer to see it disappear.’

‘By what right!’ Baskerville exploded.

Fazel gave him a paternal smile before carrying on with his account:

‘After the visit of the two diplomats, the deputies were disheartened. They were unable to confront so many enemies at the same time and could do no better than to lay the blame on the unfortunate Panoff. Several speakers accused him of being a forger and an anarchist whose sole aim was to provoke a war between Persia and Russia. The journalist had come with me to parliament and I had left him in an office near the door to the great hall so that he could give his testimony should it be necessary. Now the deputies were asking for him to be arrested and delivered to the Tsar’s legation and a motion had been put forward to that effect.

‘This man who had helped us against his own government was going to be handed over to the executioners! I who am so calm by nature, could no longer hold myself back. I jumped up on to a chair and shouted like one possessed: “I swear, by the soil which covers my father, that if this man is arrested I will call the ‘sons of Adam’ to arms and set this parliament awash in blood. No one who votes for this motion will leave here alive!” They could have lifted my immunity and arrested me too, but they did not dare. They suspended the session until the next day. That very night I left the capital for my birthplace, where I arrived today. Panoff came with me and is now hiding somewhere in Tabriz while waiting to leave the country.’

We talked and talked and soon dawn surprised us. The first calls to prayer sounded and the light became brighter. We debated and constructed a thousand gloomy futures and then debated again, too exhausted to stop. Baskerville stretched out, stopped in full flight, consulted his watch and stood up again like a sleep-walker and gave his neck a thorough scratch:

‘My God, it’s already six o’clock, a night with no sleep, how can I face my pupils? And what will the Reverend say seeing me come back at this hour?’

‘You can always pretend that you spent the night with a woman!’

Howard, however, was no longer in the mood to smile.

I do not want to speak of coincidence, since chance did not play a large role in the affair, but I am duty bound to point out that, just as Fazel finished his description of the plot being hatched against the young Persian democracy based on the documents which had been spirited away by Panoff, the coup d’état had already begun.

In fact, as I later learnt, it was toward four o’clock in the morning of that Wednesday, 23 June 1908, that a contingent of one thousand Cossacks, commanded by Colonel Liakhov, set off toward the Baharistan, the seat of the parliament, in the heart of Teheran. The building was surrounded and its exits under guard. Members of a local anjuman , who had noticed the troop movements, ran over to a neighbouring college, where a telephone had recently been installed, in order to call some deputies and certain religious democrats such as Ayatollah Behbahani and Ayatollah Tabatabai. They all came there before dawn to indicate by their presence their attachment to the constitution. Curiously the Cossacks let them through. Their orders had been to prevent anyone leaving, not entering.

The crowd of protesters kept swelling and at day-break there were several hundreds of them, including numerous ‘sons of Adam’. They had rifles, but not much ammunition — about sixty cartridges each, certainly not enough to enable them to withstand a siege. Moreover they were hesitant about using their arms and ammunition. They effectively took up position on roof-tops and behind windows but they did not know whether they should fire the first shots, thereby giving the signal for an inevitable massacre, or whether they should wait passively while the preparations for the coup were carried out.

It was precisely that which delayed the Cossack’s assault even longer. Liakhov, surrounded by Russian and Persian officers, was busy stationing his troops as well as his cannons, of which six were counted that day, the most lethal one being installed on Topkhaneh Square. On several occasions the Colonel rode within the defenders’ line of sight, but the personalities present prevented the ‘sons of Adam’ from opening fire lest the Tsar use such an incident as a pretext for invading Persia.

It was toward the middle of the afternoon that the order to attack was given. Although the sides were unequal, the fighting raged for six or seven hours. By a series of bold strokes, the resisters managed to put three cannons out of action.

However this was the heroism of despair. By nightfall the white flag of defeat was raised over the first parliament in Persian history, but several minutes after the last shot Liakhov ordered his artillery to fire again. The Tsar’s directives were clear; it was not enough to abolish the parliament, they also had orders to destroy the building which had accommodated it, so the inhabitants of Teheran would see its ruins and it would be forever a lesson to all.

Fighting had not yet come to an end in the capital when the first shooting broke out in Tabriz. I had gone to collect Howard as he came out of class and we were to meet Fazel at the anjuman to go and have dinner with one of his relatives. We had not yet stepped into the labyrinth of the bazaar when we heard shots which sounded as if they came from near by.